I'm fishing for ideas for an easy, quick and manageable personal "system" (software, non-software or a combination) for storing my ideas or "todos" and tracking their progress. What everybody here is using for something like that? What have you found works best for you?

Excel is great for tracking. While many pieces of custom software will do bits and pieces better, raw tables of data are my preferred format. The raw tables can be just a simple todo list, or it can be per-week tracking of the elapsed hours, estimated hours remaining, and other numbers. It has many ways to filter and sort, and tools like pivot tables are incredibly powerful.

I've discovered over the years that most management software doesn't really work that well for me.

I have current to-do's (today, tomorrow...) on a scrap of paper in front of me, and longer-term goals (this week, this month) on a whiteboard, marked with dates. Planning the details of larger tasks happens in a ring-bound notebook.

My project manager also has everything in SmartSheet (and can export to Excel reports), but as I said, I'm not great at updating the digital plans.

Microsoft's OneNote is pretty nice. You can buy it standalone, or it comes with every version of office (even the student pack), or with their Surface products (Pro and RT).

Its kind of a digital notebook. You can add pages, sections, and new books. You can search text, even text in images. You can paste in word docs, excel spreadsheets, etc. Its not free, but its nice. Its great for managing a loosely-collected pile of information, and for keeping notes about on-going projects.

For todos, I mostly do what hodgman does -- post-its, white-board, calendars, I'll sometimes set reminders in outlook for work stuff. I also use google calendar to organize my social life a bit -- Everyone in my circle of friends has a calendar of their own, and we have shared ones for different things, say concerts, which make it easy for everyone to know what's coming up and who's going. You can create templates for different kinds of events, send email reminders, etc. I don't use it for professional things, but it could be quite useful if you're not concerned about giving google that kind of data (you can make private calendars, but anything in the cloud is only as private as the service provider really makes them).